Retired Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algeria, 89, kept the Church going during conflict that tore the country apart and is behind the beatification of 19 religious

Archbishop Henri Teissier dedicated his life to living in Algeria. (Photo by Bruno Amsellem for La Croix)

Henri Teissier, the Archbishop-emeritus of Alger, is behind the beatification of 19 religious who were murdered in Algeria between 1994 and 1996 in the civil war with Islamic militants.

The ceremony is to take place Dec. 8 at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Holy Cross in the port city of Oran, in the northwest of the country.

Archbishop Teissier is the one who kept the Church in Algeria going during those dark days.

In Algiers, where he plies the streets in his old car, Archbishop Teissier’s numerous friendships leave him with little rest. What with invitations to weddings, funerals and award ceremonies, every day is a demonstration of his being associated with Algeria’s famous.

The other day, the widow of an Algerian academic, a Latinist and a former French inspector, called him after discovering a bible and a book of Gregorian chants when going through her late husband’s possessions.

“The Bible belonged to Sister Esther,” the archbishop said, referring to one of the two Spanish Augustinian missionaries being beatified.

“Because he wanted to learn Spanish, she agreed to lend it to him two days before she was murdered. As for the book of Gregorian chants, the Marist Brother Henri Vergès gave it to him during an inspection when he was still a teacher.”

Brother Vergès, who was murdered on May 8, 1994, is also among those being beatified.

A few days after the widow called, Archbishop Teissier met one of his former students — whom he had “taught Arabic just after independence, when there weren’t many people to do that” — as the student was getting ready to visit his mother in Libya.

Inevitably, these encounters take the former Archbishop of Alger right back into the tragedies and joys that marked his 60 years at the heart of the Church in Algeria and move him to tears.

Since, having reached the aged of 89, he no longer feels up to accepting all the invitations he receives. He’s made the difficult decision to spend part of the year in France.

It’s only been a few days since he moved, with a small selection of his books and archives — including those about the 19 martyrs — into a small apartment in the center of Lyon arranged by his nephew.

By sheer coincidence, the flat is just up the road from where, when he was a seminarian in Paris — along with among others, the late archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, he spent his holidays at his grandmother’s home.

Where does one start to try to understand a life that has been at once so simple and yet so extraordinary? How to summarize more than 50 years of priestly life, one that started in the service of the pied-noirs (people of French origin born in Algeria) and was later lived among and with Algerians?

Archbishop Teissier is among those who know colonial Algeria. His first parish had “20,000 Christians, a youth club, a choir, lay associations, scouts, catechism classes.”

Then came the upheaval of independence and the sudden decision, at the behest of the late Archbishop Joseph Marie Louis Duval of Rouen to stay in the country.

His “happiest times” were spent as a priest, then as Bishop of Oran and later as Archbishop of Alger, as he supported the Church’s work in education, integration and just helping the most needy.

It was a time “when we could do things together than made sense to us and for Algerian society,” said Archbishop Teissier.

As an example, he spoke of his friend Marie-Thérèse Brau, a pied noir who, as he himself did, was brought up in the school in the Algiers suburb of Hussein Dey run by Father Jean Sotto, a progressive priest who worked hard to set up homes for people with learning difficulties and help centres in around thirty districts.

These days, people from those times “keep on dying. I am perhaps one of the last,” the archbishop said, recalling how he and others had worked to gather the testimony of more than 200 people, members or friends of the Catholic Church in Algeria who were there in 1962.

Archbishop Teissier has seen changes within his Church and notes that religious communities, which he tirelessly courted when he ran Alger Archdiocese, have a different view of what their presence means.

A man who has always seen Christianity as a vocation rather than an identity, Teissier suffers from certain tensions from both sides of the Mediterranean. He knows that what the Church in Algeria has to say is not always well understood.

“I have accompanied catechumens to baptism, and with great joy. But should we have nothing to do with Muslims who remain Muslim? The Kingdom is built not only where people are baptised, but also where we work for humanity,” he said.

The archbishop also worries about Algeria’s tendency to issue very few visas to Catholic religious and volunteers.

“We bring this up, but we are subject to the evolution of the country and the world,” he sighed.

If he is still “optimistic” as a new, more cosmopolitan, generation is taking over, it is because he firmly believes that “this generosity of life invested in the country will pass on to future generations.”

“These days, when Caritas holds a jumble sale at the diocesan house, more than 1,000 people show up, 950 of them local Algerians,” he said.

This confidence, signs of which Archbishop Teissier carefully keeps note “is only possible thanks to the thousands of relationships woven” by the older generation.

The success of the first Islamic-Christian celebration organized in Notre-Dame of Africa in 1996 by African White Fathers is a great source of pleasure to him.

“We, the older ones, would never have worried that we would be accused of tearing Muslims from their tradition,” he said.

“Sub-Saharan religious have fewer complexes, no doubt because they come with their experience of countries where Muslims and Christians invite each other into their homes."

Christianity as a vocation rather than an identity

Best of all, the beatification of Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions should shine a light on these ties that his Church is able to forge, between North and South, between the French and the Algerians, between Christians and Muslims, between yesterday and today.

The 19 martyrs were Marists, White Fathers, Cistercians, Augustinian missionaries, a Little Sister of the Assumption, Sisters of Our Lady of the Apostles, a Little Sister of the Sacred Heart and a Dominican.

They were murdered between 1994 and 1996 during a decade of conflict that tore the country apart. They will be honored for the gift of their lives unto death.

“The generosity and faith of these religious are extremely current. It is good that the universal Church receives this witness and has decided to present it to the world without waiting for it to belong to the past,” said Archbishop Teissier, who has been working on the beatification for the better part of 20 years.

As he understands Algerian sensibilities, he is aware of the risk of this celebration being perceived as “indelicate.”

But he hopes the message will get through.

“There is no question of our setting the violence that was done to us against that which struck the whole of society. If we are recognising the life stories of our own, it is because it is our responsibility to do so. This in no way negates the faith, work and courage of all those who paid the same price,” he said.

Perhaps this beatification is the reason he survived? But perhaps we should not look for one.

“Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left,” says the Gospel (Mt 24:40).

For the current Bishop of Oran, Jean-Paul Vesco O.P., there is no doubt about it, because Archbishop Tessier faced up to every attack and every phone call announcing a death, because he “remained standing” at the head of the Church in Algeria at the height of the storm. He is the “20th blessed.”

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